Hi Whizzes! 

Welcome to Part 2 of our six part series on the Six Principles of Language Acquisition!

So, the Diva of Second Language Acquisition - Bill VanPatten, culled down around 60 years of scholarly research on Language Acquisition into Six Principles. The second one goes like this:

Language is Too Abstract and Complex to Teach and Learn Explicitly 

 

I have touched upon this principle before, but hey, I needed to be exposed to these Principles oodles of times before they really sunk in, so, here we go!

Because Principle Two is True (I’m a poet, and I didn’t even know it!), any approach to language teaching must be different from approaches to teaching other subjects. Why? Because even calling language subject matter is proof that one is on the wrong track. 

Let’s go further in:

Language is not a collection of rules and structures.

Language is an abstract, implicit, and complex mental representation.

As mental representation, it cannot be taught and learned explicitly. Language teaching needs its own pedagogy.

Each of us creates a mental representation we call language, whether it’s our first or tenth language. It’s an abstract and complex linguistic system that we are not aware of. It’s what happens to all humans with a functioning brain who didn’t grow up alone in a basement for 10+ years.

It’s also why language is implicit. We know we have it in there, but we don’t really know its content. As mental representation, then, language is internal. Sure, when we communicate, we MAY use language (most human communication is non-verbal), so language may seem external.

But communication and language are not the same.

Communication is the external use of internal things, and ONE of those internal things is language.

All of the above suggests that we can’t (or shouldn’t) go into Spanish 1 or French 1 and have the instructor talk about “features”, “phrase structures”, or any other constructs that occupy linguists. Just IMAGINE being a non-English speaking immigrant in your first English class and the instructor welcoming you with:

“Well, when the clause is finite, the subject must be in nominative case…”

Uh…yeah. Except, this happens, to some degree, all the time, and is happening now, to too many people, as I write this and you read it (I BELIEVE IN MIRACLES!!!).

Explicit rules can’t become the abstract and complex system, because they are not the data the brain needs to build the complex system.

And now, AN AUTOMOTIVE ANALOGY:

(MONA LISA VITO AND VINNY GAMBINI WOULD BE PROUD OF ME) 

A car can turn gasoline into power (which translates as movement to us), because its internal mechanisms recognize the fuel. The internal-combustion engine is a heat engine that converts energy from the heat of burning gasoline into mechanical work, or torque. That torque is applied to the wheels to make the car move.

Hot chocolate is liquid, and sure powers up some people to move. So, let me go put it into my non-existent car right now and see what happens. Boom. Nothing. Except a ton of fees to clear out all the internal systems of the hot chocolate so they can recognize the gasoline again. Wow, thank goodness all of this is happening with my imaginary Porsche, or else I’d have a huge bill on my hands.

Likewise, grammar rules and linguistic constructs fuel Linguists because that’s what they need in order to do their job well—document, analyze and preserve languages, or, research sound structure, grammar, meaning, and use of a particular language. But those inputs will not build their mental representation of said language any more than they will for language learners.

To break it down: 

Gasoline = Comprehensible, Compelling and Communication-Enhancing Linguistic Input

Torque = Mental Representation

Car Moving = Communication

Hot Chocolate = Grammar Rules, Memorization

No Torque = No Mental Representation

Car Not Moving = Human not being able to communicate in a language they've been studying despite acing (or failing) all the tests. Disappointment. 

This would explain, then, why instructors who teach with textbooks, grammar and memorization cannot provide any proof that a mental representation has been built in their students---not only because it hasn't, but because the fundamental aspects of how they teach and why they teach the way they teach are based on the wrong principles.

All these instructors have to show is ACED (or failed) TESTS, but the tests themselves are based on wrong understanding. To stick with cars, it’s like me showing you an ACED driver PERMIT test and telling you “and this is why I can drive now, better than Ayrton Senna.” Oh no no, child, you should reply, just because you memorized some driving rules and regulations and parroted them out (or silently wrote them down), doesn’t mean you can now drive.

That is to say, these instructors wouldn’t even KNOW that they need to be testing for proof of an underlying mental representation. That would only happen in a 100% research-based learning environment. When I finished my one year of Mandarin at fancy New England boarding school, I could parrot out some basic convos—all memorized, and I KNEW that if a native speaker didn’t say things exactly the way I had memorized them from the textbook (good luck with that), I wouldn’t have ANY clue how to reply. I also knew around 700 Mandarin characters, memorized. One month later, into the summer after my high school graduation, it was all gone. All except maybe 2 phrases and 3 characters. No joke. Whoosh. It wasn’t Spanish or Vanish, like my former students love to say, it was Mandarin VANISHED, period.

My Mandarin instructor (Laoshi), treated language like any other subject. She “explained” things to us, using the Textbook as a guide, and then we “practiced”. We were seated in chairs around a large square table the whole time. I was seated in between Laoshi and my friend Colin the whole time. Never moved seats, never got up to interact with anyone else. Every so often Laoshi would praise us (Hun Hao, Chen Xiao!) if we answered something correctly.

Instead of communicating with us at a basic level, and teaching us to do the same, she was more worried about:

Have the students mastered negation of “you” with “mei”?

 

I’ll answer that right now:

 

 

Teachers of other languages might be worrying about:

 

Did they learn the preterit endings correctly in Spanish?

Have they learned the rule for correct selection of the auxiliary in the French passé composé?

Have they learned the correct case-markings for articles in german or for nouns in Russian?

 

This is funny (sad), because the above are things I have encountered as a student throughout, making me the disappointed (and non-proficient) language learner I am today.

We could argue that what Bill VanPatten and I are expounding here applies to all subject matter, but we’ll let the humans in those areas deal with that. Let us focus on language. 

Constanza Ontaneda

your own personal Language Acquisition Witch

My question today is:

Have you ever studied a language, only to have it vanish from your brain? Have you ever taught one and had that happen to your students? Has it happened to your children? Tell me more!